Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
1–10 of 343 posts
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#2firefox had localized installers that also set the accept language headers correctly, dont know about chrome. using the geolocation data is good for the majority of the users i guess, although it ignores a lot of nuance about mixed populations.
back then when i was still a google product, it was very very frustrating while backpacking around the world. `hl=en` or some such parameter was the "fix".
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#3Another option is that companies (mostly Google) have different offerings in different countries. In Germany, for example, they need to apply NetzDG filtering and I assume it's similar for countries all around the world. So my assumption is they don't redirect you for the language, they redirect you to the (slightly different) service for your current location, which happens to be in the local language.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#4The article talks about Microsoft, and boy, it's even more terrible in some respects: for example, language of some Office tools like Excel is bound to the organization!
I worked for a French company, and I was forced to use web Excel in French, including keyboard shortcuts being FR-specific ("ctrl-g" for "bold" - "grossir").
I had my language set to English everywhere in browser, OS, MS profile, Office profile etc., not important.
(FWIW native Windows Excel didn't have this issue, so I sticked with native Excel).
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Re: location based on geoloc: I remember some HN user from Switzerland saying that IIRC either his IP is being moved around in geoIP databases between Swiss regions, or getting slightly distinct IP each time; as a result, he randomly gets all kinds of websites in French, and sometimes in German. Imagine this.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#5Which language Google uses is different from product to product. In Google forms, they use the language set in the Google account (neither location, nor browser language), which is frustrating, because as a designer of a survey you have no way to control the language the UI elements in your survey.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#6The article talks about Microsoft, and boy, it's even more terrible in some respects: for example, language of some Office tools like Excel is bound to the organization ! I worked for a French company, and I was forced to use web Excel in French, including keyboard shortcuts being FR-specific ("ctrl-g" for "bold" - "grossir"). I had my language set to English everywhere in browser, OS, MS profile, Office profile etc.…
And docs.microsoft.com pulls the language unchangably from the location: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/feedback/issues/462
It's so annoying. There is an option to change the language, however I have to change it every time I search for something, because the language doesn't get saved
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#7This is extremely annoying, especially when you're in a country with high level of English proficiency and a small population. In that scenario, you're not going to have a lot of local language results. Something like Wikipedia, which has decent quality in English, will tend to look like it was edited by high school students. Yet Google will force-redirect you to the local Wikipedia language over the vastly superior English article, even when searching for something in English.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#8firefox had localized installers that also set the accept language headers correctly, dont know about chrome. using the geolocation data is good for the majority of the users i guess, although it ignores a lot of nuance about mixed populations. back then when i was still a google product, it was very very frustrating while backpacking around the world. `hl=en` or some such parameter was the "fix".
google.com/ncr (no country redirect) was the panacea until Google broke it.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#9The article talks about Microsoft, and boy, it's even more terrible in some respects: for example, language of some Office tools like Excel is bound to the organization ! I worked for a French company, and I was forced to use web Excel in French, including keyboard shortcuts being FR-specific ("ctrl-g" for "bold" - "grossir"). I had my language set to English everywhere in browser, OS, MS profile, Office profile etc.…
And in Office there is even worse to be found: Depending on that locale, that it chooses despite browser settings, you also get different behavior, when trying to open CSVs with literally a _comma_ separator, because Excel thinks, that it must interpret that as a character for making numbers more readable or other shenanigans.
Re: Why does Google use location for language rather than browser settings?
#10The article talks about Microsoft, and boy, it's even more terrible in some respects: for example, language of some Office tools like Excel is bound to the organization ! I worked for a French company, and I was forced to use web Excel in French, including keyboard shortcuts being FR-specific ("ctrl-g" for "bold" - "grossir"). I had my language set to English everywhere in browser, OS, MS profile, Office profile etc.…
It's bound to the version of office you buy. IIRC there are some hacks which let you change it.